Yet earlier this year, when Google interviewed its employees about what they valued most at work, none of these extravagant benefits made the top of the list. Neither did salary. Instead, employees cited access to “even-keeled bosses who made time for one-on-one meetings, who helped people puzzle through problems by asking questions, not dictating answers, and who took an interest in employees’ lives and careers.”

Tangibles like salary and benefits aren’t enough to guarantee that your best and brightest creatives will remain engaged. Indeed, a recent landmark study by Arnold Worldwide of 3,000 employees and 500 executive leaders across a range of communication and advertising firms found that 30 percent of the advertising workforce say they’ll be gone from their job within 12 months.

Take Jill, an outstanding, experienced copy editor whom Agency X recently recruited at considerable expense from one of its chief rivals. Despite her outward success, she’s unsure how she’s performing, where she stands in the company, and how she fits into the overall goals of the agency. Her pay is great, she loves the Friday office happy hour, but over time, she finds herself feeling demotivated by the lack of communication, and checks out.

The loss of star performers like Jill doesn’t just leave a talent vacuum to fill; it also leaves a gaping hole in the bottom line. Indeed, a recent article in the Wall Street Journal calculated that it typically costs a company about half a position’s annual salary to recruit for that job ¾ and several times that if the position requires rare skills.

So how can your company keep its stars engaged? It comes down to creating a culture of communication — one in which employees know where the organization is headed, how they fit into these plans, and what’s expected of them. Here are a few key strategies your agency can employ to make this happen.

1. Create a culture of education

The average Starbucks barista gets more training in a year than the average employee in a communications company, according to the Arnold Worldwide study.

For employees, the single most important motivational factor was the ability to learn. Yet the study found a huge disconnect when it comes to perceptions about company training. While 90 percent of employees say they learn by figuring things out on their own, only 25 percent of executives think that employees learn independently.

To keep employees motivated, agencies need to build a culture of learning, where employees leave more enriched at the end of each day.

2. Provide regular, consistent feedback

Employee feedback is a critical part of the education process, and shouldn’t just be relegated to the annual review. To be effective, feedback needs to be specific and actionable. But that’s not always how it works.

In a study by Leadership IQ, 53 percent of employees said that when their boss praises excellent performance, the feedback does not provide enough useful information to help them repeat it. And 65 percent responded that when their boss criticizes poor performance, it doesn’t provide enough useful information to help them correct the issue.

Feedback, both positive and constructive, is most effective when given right away. Negative feedback given a month after the fact can lead to a passive-aggressive environment in which an employee feels powerless to act on the advice.

Think of it this way: no one wants to go a full day knowing their price tag was hanging from the back of their shirt, or the remnants of the salad they had for lunch were still stuck in their teeth. If an employee does something well, that activity should be encouraged. And if there’s room for improvement, they should be given the opportunity to learn for their next task.

3. Set time aside for weekly 1:1 meetings

At first, most employees and managers will cringe at the idea of yet another meeting. But instituting weekly 1:1 meetings can be the most important step you take to retaining your top performers.

In its quest to build a better boss, Google discovered that its worst managers weren’t consistent in their 1:1 meetings; some focused on meeting with people who were underperforming, while others met primarily with the top performers.

Consequently, Google implemented the best practice of 1:1 meetings with all team members.

These meetings can cover anything and everything from upcoming projects to the latest client news. With each week, discussions about goals, feedback, and concerns become a lot more natural unlike the awkward, starchy conversations during annual reviews. Over time, it becomes easier for both sides to raise potential problems and deal with them early on, before they fester into something destructive.

4. Manage the grunt work properly

Not every project is going to be awesome. That’s just the way business works. And chances are your employees understand this.

However, managers need to handle such projects responsibly and that means a few things. Boring projects should always be balanced with more stimulating work. Employees should always be told how any grunt works fits into the overall needs of the company (“If we do a good job on x, we’re hoping the client will give us their cool launch next year”). And specific parameters should always be set for the boring stuff ¾ meaning employees should always see light at the end of the tunnel.

5. Publicly acknowledge good work

All too often, managers see motivation in terms of financial compensation, but money is far from the only way to effectively reward talented employees. A 2009 survey by McKinsey Quarterly asked which incentives were the most effective in motivating employees. The top two responses were: “Praise and commendation from immediate manager” (67 percent), and “Attention from leaders” (62 percent).

Praise and commendation go a long way in making employees feel noticed and valued. And the impact of a pat on the back is multiplied when it’s done publicly. Through public commendations, employees not only feel the support and respect of their manager, but the entire organization as well (including top-level executives). Creating a framework for “social recognition” will encourage a culture of appreciation throughout your firm.

Keeping your rockstar employees on board has always been important, and don’t think that economic uncertainty will keep your employees around. Your company has worked hard to recruit some bright people and great talent; make sure an opaque work environment doesn’t drive them into the arms of your competition.

Learn more about how to keep remote workers happy and your team collaborating at GigaOM’s Net:Work event on December 8, 2011.

Daniel Debow is co-founder and co-CEO of Rypple, a social performance management platform.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Esparta. 

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I’ve been having conference calls that end up resulting in additional conference calls to discuss the findings of the previous conference call, and then having more conference calls that are required with another group of people because some folks got left out of the loop either purposely or accidentally and then we have to entirely or partially re-cap them… with another conference call.

It doesn’t matter if 20 email chains go back and forth that summarize the calls, the conferences never seem to end. Effectively, each successive conference call turns into a partial repeat of the one before it, resulting in a vicious cycle of “Groundhog Day” all week long.

Do you know how I realize that conference calls are becoming a serious problem? I have three VOIP handsets that I have dedicated to my business line. It’s not unusual for me to completely chain-smoke the charging on all three handsets for a 10 or 12 hour workday, of which 70 to 80 percent of that day is dedicated to conference calls.

And it’s not just Perlow who is experiencing conference call issues. As director of business development at the Acumen Fund, Sacha Dichter is pretty far removed from the world of IT, but he has a similar complaint to Perlow — conference calls can really suck. Dichter diagnosis many of his calls as suffering from “telephonitis,” which he described as “the process whereby otherwise conversant, engaged, active people become silent in the face of a group conference call.” To fight the dread condition, Dichter offers a number of tips including:

When silence starts to set in, start cold calling people. This has two effects: making sure you’re hearing from people, and creating an incentive (for those who don’t like being called on) for people to speak up when they have something to say.

Never equate silence with agreement. It’s bad enough to do this in person. Worse still on the phone.

Marketing guru and author Seth Godin has experienced the telephonitis phenomenon as well, but he offers a different solution –- using chat in parallel with voice calls (he recommends Campfire), which he says offers three advantages:

When you put text chat in parallel with a voice conference call, magical things happen. The first is that everyone participates. If you don’t, it’s noticeable and you won’t be invited back.

Second, the voice part of the call acts as a narrative for the chat part, allowing people to highlight or respond to what’s being said.

Most of all, it creates organized, trackable chaos, which was the reason for the meeting in the first place.

In a previous WebWorkerDaily Tales from the Trenches posts, Orange Business Services’ Mark Fitzpatrick said his team had great success with Godin’s parallel chat technique. Keeping a chat log of calls and reactions to what’s been said is also one possible solution to Perlow’s complaint about time-wasting “catch-up” conference calls, allowing those that missed earlier information to read up on what they missed rather than being told over yet another call.

How does your team battle telephonitis and conference call overload?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Editor B, CC 2.0.

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• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

Hacking work is both the title of a book and descriptive of a growing movement. Transparency and greater control are growing organizational norms so it should not be surprising that people are taking advantage of their increased insight and opportunity to make work better, both for themselves and their colleagues.

There are close to 130 M-Prize stories/case studies and hacks on offer as I write this. That’s more than 130 people (as some have been submitted by author teams) spending many hours thinking and writing about how to make work better. The Management Innovation Exchange (MIX) community that supports the prize practices what many of us preach: For organizational projects to succeed, human motivations, technology support, and organizational practices must all be brought to bear. Just creating a website to share ideas would never have been enough to create this kind of interest and effort.

I had the chance to see the process firsthand when I was invited to join the pilot “hackathon” focused on enabling communities of passion. The idea of the hackathon grew out of feedback to the MIX leadership that working individually wasn’t enough — that the results would be better if there were a way to make a collective contribution. Across the weeks of the hackathon we worked through focusing questions, challenges, mini-hacks, and discussion, guided by Chris Grams, our “MIX Guide.” We then took the big step and transformed many of these mini-hacks into M-Prize submissions. I know that without this process and support I would not have submitted my hack (on the topic of leading by negotiation).

Programming / coding hackathons are popular:

• Facebook’s Hackamonth
• Google’s Summer of Code
• EBay/PayPal iPadDevCamp

Here’s to using that same hackathon energy and hacking techniques to improve our work process. For more, see the hacks and stories submitted for the M-Prize, check out this Hacking Work Manifesto, or better yet, create and share your own hack.

If you’ve created a hack, or find one in the M-Prize submissions that you think is especially valuable, please share it with us here.

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To find out, we spoke with Yosh Beier, the co-founder of Collaborative Coaching, which specializes in encouraging productive collaboration among teams. He has extensive international experience assisting both local teams and teams of web workers, so we asked him what makes a great manager of a dispersed team. He offered six practices that are particularly important for those leading distributed teams:

• How vs. what. You’re busy – everyone is – so you skimp on talking about how you’ll work together in favor of focusing on what you need to deliver. An understandable decision, but a mistake, particularly for remote teams, says Beier.  “When the rubber hits the road, which invariably it will at some stage, this really impedes the effectiveness of a team. The fact that teams are dispersed adds complexity because it is even harder to build trust and give people feedback.” So find the time to speak with your team about those all-important “how” questions: How are we making decisions? How do we give each other feedback? How do we want to deal with conflict and how do we want to bring it up?
• Bring out your inner Dirt Devil. If there’s dirt being swept under the rug, you have to get it out in the open. “If teams are dispersed it’s so much easier to avoid the kind of constructive conflict that should happen,” Beier noted. “It’s really the job of a team leader to be super finely attuned to the possibility that there is conflict that’s swept under the rug and then really make sure that it is being unearthed.”
• Build an operating manual for cultural difference.  Remote teams, by their nature, are more likely to be cross-cultural. Don’t stick your head in the sand and hope for the best. Instead Beier suggests “cultural introductions” where you explicitly bring your team together to talk about questions like, “where did you grow up?” and “what do I need to work well in a team?” Beier explains: “We say, if you could give co-workers an operating instruction manual about you, what would you say? Then people have a chance to say, ‘I like it this way. I like it that way. I like feedback clearly or not publicly,’ depending on what kind of cultural preferences people have. There is a chance up front to be clear about the different expectations that people have if they have different backgrounds. People have a chance to see the person and not just the role. It tends to give people the trust, when the going gets tougher, to say, hey wait a second, something is really not working for me.”
• Be ambidextrous. No, you don’t need to write with both hands, but you do need the flexibility to balance tasks and team building. “Realize what markers tell you to be more task oriented, for instance if you already have performance measurements and you’re falling behind. But also what indicators tell you to be a little more relationship focused, for instance, if there’s a reluctance to give critical feedback. The trick is team leaders who are flexible enough to do both.”
• Fend off the “kumbaya” charge. Does this all sound a little touchy-feely to you? Some team members are likely to agree, so Beier recommends framing all this sharing in hard-nosed business language. “Make clear what the purpose is. It is really important for people to understand we’re not just there to say kumbaya at the end of the day. We’re there to get our job done in a way that is more effective and possibly also more creative.”
• The virtual open door. You don’t have a traditional office so you don’t have a door, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a virtual open door policy. “Being very approachable as a team leader is hugely important,” says Beier. “Reiterate that message over and over again, particularly at the beginning: I am approachable by phone, by email, by whatever way people prefer.”

What were the toughest challenges for you when you first started managing web workers?

Photo courtesy Flickr user ChrisDag

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• The Future of Workplaces
• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview
• Connected Consumer Q1: The Over-the-Top vs. Pay TV Battle Heats Up

Increasingly, the information we use to manage our companies is moving to the cloud, and human resources is no exception. Here are several solutions that provide simple and affordable online employee management and tracking to save you time, money and effort.

TribeHR is one of the more robust platforms of all the options, providing many HR management tools in one app:

• Vacation/leave tracking. Select, approve and track vacation and leave days, including earned and taken days. View vacation requests, as well as who is currently on vacation or leave.
• Employee development. Set, track, and complete goals, privately or shared. Get feedback and peer input, and collect notes and comments for performance reviews. You can also securely store employee evaluations for future reference, and track and rank employee skills company-wide.
• Employee notes and feedback. Privacy-controlled note-taking for employees and managers, as well as public employee recognition and company feedback.
• Shared resources. Post and store files for employee access and viewing. You can even track who acknowledges viewing the files you post.
• Job postings. Post available jobs for your organization and accept applications, make and share notes, and rank applicants.
• Reports. Generate reports for taken/available vacation and sick time, goal progress, skills, and file reading acknowledgement.

TribeHR also provides data portability, so you can export your company information. Plans range from $19 per month for up to 15 users, going up to $399 per month for unlimited users. A free trial is available.

BambooHR

BambooHR is another powerful HR software option with several great features to help  you manage your employee data:

• Employee records. Track employee information, such as contact information, dependents, emergency contacts, salary, and position history.
• Vacation/leave Tracking. As with TribeHR, BambooHR allows the tracking and management of employee leave time and allows employees to request time off for manager approval. It also tracks leave time accruals and balances.
• Training time tracking. Track one-time and recurring training, and even set due dates and alerts so that you can monitor employee training.
• Benefit tracking. Track benefit eligibility and enrollment dates, plans and coverage, as well as employee and company contributions.
• Online document storage. Store and share forms, applications, documents and performance reviews.
• Reports. Generate employee data reports, including job and salary history, leave time used, turnover rate, and create your own custom reports using BambooHR’s filtering and sorting capabilities.

Plans range from $79 per moth for up to 50 employees, going up to $599 per month for 1,000 employees. A free trial is available.

Effortless HR

Effortless HR offers features to help you centralize and manage employee information:

• Employee records/management. Save important employee information, including contact details, job information, benefits, skills, and performance data.
• Employee portal. Employees can update information, request time off, and clock in or out from within the Effortless HR platform.
• Employee email. Send company or department emails and announcements.
• Time tracking. Employees can clock in or clock out through the online interface and can view the hours they’ve worked in a given week. Managers can export time reports to work with your payroll software.
• File area. Share files with your entire company or with specific employees.
• Reports. Import and export employee information.

Plans range from $29.95 per month for up to 19 employees, going up to $99.95 per month for up to 1,000 employees.

iEmployee

iEmployee provides web-based time and attendance management and tracking through four separate products (costs are not disclosed on the website).

• Online paystubs. Provide paystub information online to eliminate printing and distribution costs. It also allows you to maintain an online archive of all paystubs for future reference.
• Timesheets. With its online tracking system, iEmployee provides an easy way to process payroll and improve accuracy.
• Vacation/leave tracking. Managers and employees are able to track vacation and sick time, and employees can request leave online for manager review and approval.
• Time clocks. The online interface, as well as optional time clock hardware and Integrated Voice Response (IVR) telephony features, allow employees to clock in and out.

All the solutions outlined above provide the ability to track and manage employee information remotely, making human resources yet another aspect of your company that can be accessed and stored completely online.

How do you manage and track employees and HR data?

Photo courtesy Flickr user Alex E. Proimos

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I think about this all the time as it relates to my business. Generally, we come up with plans, ways we’re going to market our businesses, manage them, and keep things growing and moving along smoothly, but what are we missing? Are there blind spots we don’t yet know exist that could potentially be fatal to the success of our companies?

Blind Spot #1: Giving Up Too Soon (or Not Planning to Weather the First Years)

One of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen small business owners make is simply giving up too soon. We all want to chase after shiny new distractions as they show up, but many times, we already have everything we need to succeed, if we would only stay the course and allow enough time for our business ideas to take hold.

It’s so important to plan for the hard times of that first year or so in business, when there’s very little money coming in. Plan to cut corners as much as possible, both with your personal and business expenses, so that you can afford to stick with it until you start generating revenue.

Many times, it’s easy to look back on past ideas and failures and think, “If I had only stuck with that, I think it could have worked.” You have to be willing and able to hang in there for the long haul, and so often, it’s just too hard for business owners to weather that first year or so.

Blind Spot #2: Not Consistently and Actively Promoting the Business

A close runner-up in fatal blind spots is not actively and consistently promoting the business. So many times, business owners get caught up in planning and tinkering the minor things within the business that they neglect actually going out and finding new customers or clients on a regular basis.

I was fortunate to have gotten my start in real estate, where you have to work under the guidance of a broker for several years before being able to go out on your own, and in the real estate industry, one of the first things you’re taught is how important lead generation is to your success. I can remember my broker telling us that the most successful and experienced agents in the firm still did lead generation a couple of hours a day. Of course, I had no idea what lead generation was at the time, but at least the importance of it stuck with me all these years.

Part of the problem for most business owners is not knowing what to do when it comes to promoting their businesses. There are so many different tactics for marketing and promotion that it can quickly become confusing and overwhelming.  It would be far more helpful for new business owners to hear that they should simply pick two or three tactics for promoting their businesses, plan to stick with them for six to twelve months, and to be very aggressive with them for at least two hours each and every day.

Blind Spot #3: Thinking You Can Do Everything Yourself

A third blind spot most business owners have is thinking they can do everything themselves (or thinking that they have to do everything themselves). Lack of money, time and even experience can make a business owner think he or she is not in the position to hire help, and the process of finding and building a support team can seem like a full time job on its own.

The good news is that it’s possible to inch your way into delegation by finding ways to outsource one piece of your work at a time, and if you don’t think you can afford a paid assistant at the beginning, start with a few interns. That way, you can slowly test the waters with a support staff, while also seeing if the interns you hire would make good permanent additions to your team.

For most of us, the thought of starting a new business is as exciting as first learning to drive: we just want to be given the keys, jump in the car, and go! Certainly, there’s room for the thrill of being in control and finally going where we want to go, but if we want to avoid as many fender benders as possible, it helps to know to look out for blind spots.

What blind spots do you think most small business owners have in the beginning?

Photo by Flickr user PhotoDu.de, licensed under CC 2.0

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Why You Need a Dream Team

Before you can build it, you have to believe that you need a dream team. As a small business owner, it’s easy to become complacent in our roles and just accept that we wear all the hats, but that’s probably a mistake if:

1. We hope to build thriving and sustainable businesses that don’t require our physical presence to keep them afloat,
2. We hope to eventually sell our businesses, retire, or at least have one or both options available to us, and
3. We want lives and some semblance of balance outside our businesses.

The bottom line is that we are not islands, and we don’t have to build our businesses by ourselves. With the right plan, a little patience, and some persistence, it’s possible to build a dream team, and possibly achieve more than you ever imagined for your business.

Who’s On Your Dream Team?

You’ve established that you need a dream team, but now who do you need on it? Each business will be slightly different in its needs, and every business owner will have his or her own preferences about who to include, but here are a few suggestions for who might make up your company’s dream team.

Your Marketing and Advertising Team

No matter what your business, one of your primary goals should be meeting new people in your target market and finding prospects who might become customers or clients, but as with many other responsibilities of a small business owner, it’s easy to get behind with marketing and lead generation, which makes this the perfect area to look for dream team members. Some of the possible roles and responsibilities to cover might include:

• Networking (in-person and online),
• Direct marketing (sales letters, email marketing, sales calls, etc.),
• Web marketing (managing your website, PPC advertising, search engine optimization, etc.),
• Event management (managing speaking engagements and events),
• Publicity and promotion (managing guest posts, media opportunities, etc.),
• Social media (managing Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.), and
• Advertising (radio, television, magazine, Facebook, sponsorships, etc.).

Also, don’t forget that with lead generation comes leads, metrics, and a database to manage, so it might be helpful to have someone overseeing the admin side of your marketing and advertising efforts.

Your Operational Team

You’re in the business of selling some type of product or service, and while you might be the primary person delivering those goods or services, you should always be thinking of ways to leverage your efforts. This might include team members who oversee:

• Product and service development and/or delivery,
• Customer service and current customer accounts,
• Your editorial calendar and content generation efforts,
• Your financial picture, budget, and taxes,
• Your schedule and personal/in-house organization, and
• Human resources, training and education.

How to Build Your Dream Team

Once you know who you want on your dream team, the next and probably longest step is actually building it, and this is where you’ll need a big dose of patience, creativity and persistence. One approach I’ve been implementing more recently is the use of interns. Rather than trying to locate highly-targeted virtual assistants (which, for me, wasn’t proving to be a successful method), I’ve been able to find ambitious, creative college students who are studying to go into the different lines of work that fall under my business.

Not only does this approach help me find motivated, talented and specialized support for my business, it also helps me find prospective permanent hires who are being both trained and screened as we go.

Building a dream team for your small business is possible, if you know the goals you’re trying to achieve and then find creative ways to fill the gaps and find support. While I can say that building a team hasn’t been the easiest part of running my business, it’s certainly opened my mind to new possibilities for growth and improvement.

Looking for some tips on how to recruit your dream team? Check out this recent post from Huddle’s Andy McLoughlin on using the web to find a team of peers.

Who would be on your dream team, and what methods are you using for building it?

Photo by Flickr user woodleywonderworks, licensed under CC 2.0

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I’ve been exploring, writing and podcasting about how our lives and our work have become inundated with technology, information and connectivity, and trying to figure out what this means to us holistically — that is physically, mentally, emotionally and even spiritually. I call this project The Zen of Being Digital.

Social media is merely an extension of the things that many of us have already learned about via online communications, connections and communities:

• People want to communicate with other people.
• People want to connect with like-minded people and form communities.
• People want to access information that is useful to them in some way.
• People want to share information with others and to be recognized by others.

Let’s face it: We’re human. We will create, gravitate toward, and use the technologies that help us get closer to other people in some way — even if it is merely virtual.

How Can We Use Social Media to Complement Human Nature?

I’d like to share a framework for thinking about social media engagement and interactions based on the premise that social media is merely an extension of what we already know about interacting with others online:

1. Who has reached out to you? Someone reaching out to you is an effort that should be honored, so pay attention to your direct messages on Twitter and the messages in your Facebook Inbox and respond if people are making a connection with you.
2. Who is trying to reach you? Not everyone can reach you directly in social media so pay attention to overtures, such as @ messages on Twitter and comments on your Facebook Page, and respond.
3. Who are you trying to reach? The beauty of social tools is that you, too, can reach out to make connections with others through a myriad of tools and features. So choose your connections wisely and rather than always casting wide nets, find ways to zero in on making fewer, more meaningful connections.
4. What do you have to share? The more you connect with others via friend, fan, and follower-type connecting tools, be thoughtful about how and what you share and why you share it, keeping in mind that you can strengthen your connections with value and sever them by being thoughtless.

A fifth piece of this framework is something companies look to do, and while I’d argue it is time consuming, it can be an effective way of reaching others: “How can you support a forum where others can connect?” Or put in another way, how can you build and nurture a community to help others connect with like-minded people and with the company who is hosting the community platform?

If all of us approach social media tools with a basic notion of how to frame our activities on our blogs, via microblogs, in social networks, and on other sites that facilitate connecting and sharing, we begin to pave a path for more purposeful and less chaotic interactions. We’ll make more meaningful connections. We will feel less stress and strain.

Reframing How You Think About Social Media

We are overloaded. There are always going to be new things that attract our attention or seem to demand our time. Just remember that technology is neither good or bad. Social media isn’t the greatest thing to happen to our world or the worst thing. How we use social media, however, can be the difference between enhancing our communications and spiral into an endless time suck.

To truly “master” social media — or any technology for that matter — try applying these principles to the way you adapt and adopt new things:

• Attention. Pay close attention to the handful of quality tools that can help you reach the people you want to reach and achieve the objectives you want to achieve. Don’t let yourself get distracted by the “next big thing” but find your focus and direction and give it the attention it deserves.
• Intention. Get to the heart of what you are trying to achieve using social media tools. Be honest about it not just to others but to yourself as well. A negative intention can repel others as much as a positive intention can attract.
• Discipline. Only you can truly manage your time and attention. Be more diligent about how you spend your time online. Only you can make the difference between frivolous time-wasting and gleaning real benefits from social networking.
• Awareness. As you adopt new technologies and add new communications methods to your daily routine, be intensely aware of its affects on you and on those around you. Modify your behavior if your choices are causing unnecessary stress and strain.
• Openness. Social media tools are not “hard to use,” or “frustrating” or “time-consuming.” We tend to cause our own frustration or feelings of being overwhelmed by clinging to the notion that “the way we’ve always done it” is the right or only way or that a new way is too hard. Open up, loosen up, relax.

How are you approaching social media to create more meaning and less stress?

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In past jobs, I managed quite a few people who worked out of remote locations. Some of them worked from home full-time while others were in offices that were spread out in California and Washington while I worked here in Portland, Oregon. But right now, all of the people that I manage are working in the same office building. While we all work from home regularly, we all have cubicles in our office. However, that is all about to change. The building that we work in is being renovated this summer, and we’re being kicked out of our little boxes. There isn’t really room for us in the other buildings, so the company is encouraging us to work from home full-time from July through September. I’ll be managing remotely again, and here are my tips for managing a remote team.

Regular Staff Meetings

It’s important to get the team together on a regular basis to stay in touch with each other and keep up with what other team members are working on. Depending on the team and how much collaboration happens between team members, you may want to meet weekly, monthly or somewhere in between. I’ve worked on teams of program managers where the team members spent most of their time working with stakeholders outside of the team, so the staff meetings focused on learning best practices from each other along with occasional corporate communications or budget updates. Other teams work much more closely together and meet more frequently to collaborate on common tasks. It’s important to get the team together occasionally at least over the phone, but how often you need to meet depends on the team.

Check In Regularly

The focus here should be on checking in with your employees (not checking up on them). This could be a regular meeting with each employee or something less formal over IM or email, as needed. One of the most important responsibilities of any manager is to make sure that the people who work for you have what they need to accomplish their jobs efficiently. You may need to help them overcome roadblocks from other teams, which could involve kicking some butt on their behalf, or you may need to help them get budget for some critical resources. When people are working remotely, it can be easy for them to feel a little alone, so it’s important to keep in touch and let them know that you’re happy to help with whatever they need.

Email Updates

I mentioned the importance of email updates for remote employees last week as way to make sure their manager knows exactly what they are doing. This goes both ways, and managers should also be providing regular updates for remote employees. These updates might include any corporate communications people need to know, updates from other teams and anything else you might hear that impacts the people who work on your team. Making sure that the people who work for you have accurate updates is especially important for remote employees who might otherwise miss important information.

An important task for any manager is to make sure that your team stays well connected and productive regardless of the obstacles. This is especially true for remote employees who can become disconnected from the company and other team members if they don’t have good support. Getting everyone working together regardless of their location is critical for managers of remote teams.

What are your tips for managing remote workers?

Photo by Dawn Foster, used with permission.

However, at some point, a business gets too big (hopefully) for one person to do it all. Choices have to be made about starting to delegate tasks to other people. Which areas of responsibility should an entrepreneur hand over to others, and at what point in their business’s growth? Those can be hard calls to make.

I’m currently at the point of having to make some of those decisions myself. My business, which up until recently I’ve been running basically by myself, has grown exponentially in the past 12 months. I have come to the reluctant conclusion that I need help, but I’ve been struggling with how to best go about getting it.

I did make one recent change, which means I’m not doing absolutely everything myself. I brought a contributing writer onto my web site to help me produce content. But that decision was more the result of happening upon the perfect opportunity than of strategic planning, and now I need to figure out how to move forward with more delegating of responsibilities.

As I’ve weighed how to go about this, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are several prime factors to consider in deciding what tasks to offload and how to do it.

• Know your value. Remember to focus on what your true value is to the company. In my company’s case, my personal brand is closely tied to the brand of my company. Readers equate me with Scrapbook Update. It would be counter-productive to the success of the company for me to hire writers to be the visible face of the company while retiring into a behind-the-scenes editorial role. (The writer I recently added expanded the site’s offerings rather than taking burden off of me.)
• Know the true cost. Some types of help will cost more to bring in than others. But these costs must be weighed in relation to how much time will be freed up for you to expend on income-producing activities. Help that seems expensive but which provides you a lot more income-producing time that you are able to take full advantage of may actually be very cost-effective. Also, don’t forget that paying for an expert to take on certain responsibilities could lead to those tasks being done in a way that saves the company money (for instance, an accountant might be able to find tax savings for the company that would offset the costs of accounting services).
• Know your abilities. As our businesses grow, some of our company’s functions may get complex enough that we really have no choice as a smart business person but to call in experts to perform them. There might be other tasks that you could more cost-effectively outsource, but if your needs in a certain area are getting too complex for your DIY skills, then you need to make getting help in that area a priority. Experts that you may need to hand off responsibilities to might include accountants, lawyers, web designers and sales people.

Don’t forget to factor personal tasks in your evaluation as well. There are only 24 hours in a day. Since time spent on non-work related tasks can’t be spent elsewhere, examine everywhere that you are spending your time and consider whether responsibilities can be delegated. Perhaps it would be cost-effective to outsource cleaning your house, or mowing your lawn. (And I’ll bet you wouldn’t miss doing those tasks, either.)

At some point, we have to admit we can’t run every function of our business ourselves. Even a control freak like Steve Jobs has help. Admit you need help, then go about getting the right help for you and your company.

What responsibilities would it be a good idea for you to delegate?

Photo by Flickr user ralphbijker, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.